92 national geographic • october 2015
Then I teach from seven until noon. Teaching
doesn’t pay me enough to feed my family.” What
he catches, he smoke cures, and his wife then
transports the dried fish by water to Kisangani—
five or six days of paddling each way. Kisangani,
Cesar says, is the farthest from home that he’s
ever been.
For teaching Yailombo’s 53 third graders, he
says, the villagers pay him about $18.50 a month.
The bamboo schoolhouse is all the village has,
because it takes more than a day by pirogue to
get to the nearest government-registered school.
“Has anyone from the Congolese government
ever visited Yailombo?” I ask.
Cesar nods. “During election season, when
they campaign with their propaganda,” he says.
“They come and make promises to build a clinic
or a school. It never happens.”
Like every other village we visit, Yailombo
has no clinic, no paved roads, no cars, no run-
ning water, no electricity, no phone service, no
Internet, no police, no newspapers. What it has
are the river and the bush. If nothing else, the
remoteness protects such hamlets from the car-
nage inflicted by militias in the eastern DRC.
Several days before arriving in Yailombo, on the
outskirts of Kisangani, we encountered Wage-
nia fishermen, who are famed for their auda-
cious method of netting fish while clinging to
bamboo scaffolds just above the Congo River’s
frothing cataracts. When I asked the 47-year-old
Wagenia chief, Beaka Aifila, if there’d ever been
a time when his people had felt the presence of
an external authority, he didn’t hesitate.
“During the six-day war,” he replied, referring
to the June 2000 conflict between Ugandan and
Rwandan troops in the brutal Second Congo
War (1998-2003), when heavy fighting spilled
over into Kisangani. “In the mornings when
we checked our nets, we found human bodies
instead of fish.”
We leave the Lomami River and return to
the Congo. It’s now the rainy season, and we
have the great river practically to ourselves
as we head northwest with the current. Days
pass without the sight of another motorized
vessel. For whatever reason, commerce is slow,
barges are scarce. At the same time, the fish-
ermen in their pirogues are having less luck
in the rain-swollen river. We buy everything
they have. Whenever we hear of markets, we
go to them—bustling bazaars a mile or so into
the bush—and acquire peanuts, bananas, bread,
tomatoes, charcoal.
Each stop at one of the larger river towns—
which we make only when we must, for gaso-
line and other important supplies—entails a
dreary encounter with some uniformed offi-
cial from the Direction Générale de Migration,
who pores over our papers and asks the same
skeptical questions and ultimately demands
his price for the favor of leaving us alone. Our
traveling group includes an affable fellow from
the Kisangani office of the Agence Nationale de
Renseignements (ANR), the Congo’s version of
the FBI. Ostensibly we’re paying him to ensure
our expeditious passage downriver. In practice,
he’s there to help drink our beer.
From time to time the brilliant azure skies
darken, an avalanche of rain pummels our pi-
rogue, and we duck into a cove of raggedy homes
on stilts, where the fishermen take us in and
offer us yellow plastic jugs full of palm wine.
At dusk we seek out bare tracts along the river
where we can spread our sleeping bags and cook
our food. The locals gather around us and stare
at our laptops for as long as we use them. We
push out early each morning after first paying
the fishermen for the use of their land. The dis-
tant sight of them still waving from the shore-
line of those unnamed communes is what I
choose to remember rather than the uniformed
grifters in Bumba and Lisala.
After a long day plowing up the storm-churned
Mongala River, a tributary to the Congo, we ar-
rive late one evening at the port town of Binga.
A large bald man climbs out of a pickup truck
and embraces us at the docks. It’s Celestin, the
passenger on Joseph’s boat who’d dreamed that
two foreigners would come visit him.
For the next few nights in Binga, Pascal and
I are treated to surprising comfort, reposing
in a handsome four-bedroom house of wood